Her Discovery Wasn’t Alien Life, but Science Has Never Been the Same

Sarah Scoles

With TV cameras pointed at her, Felisa Wolfe-Simon began speaking at NASA headquarters in Washington on Dec. 2, 2010. “I’ve discovered — I’ve led a team that has discovered — something that I’ve been thinking about for many years,” Wolfe-Simon said. She was at that time a visiting researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey, speaking to a sizable audience of journalists and bloggers, two of them wearing tinfoil hats, and hordes of streamers online.

Days before, NASA had teased “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” Speculation that NASA had discovered some kind of alien life bred exponentially across nascent social media platforms. Wolfe-Simon had, unfortunately, not found aliens, nor had she ever said she did. But she had found a terrestrial organism that was behaving unlike any life form known on Earth.

`The creature came from the mud of Mono Lake, a body of water near Yosemite National Park that is nearly three times as salty as the Pacific Ocean. The lake has the pH level of glass cleaner and, most important for her team’s discovery, is full of toxic arsenic. All known living things use six major chemical elements to keep their bodies churning. One is phosphorus. But from Mono Lake, Wolfe-Simon’s team said they had isolated an organism that could replace phosphorus with arsenic.

“I’d like to introduce to you today the bacterium GFAJ-1,” she proclaimed. A picture of magnified black and white cylinders appeared on the screen. “We’ve cracked open the door to what’s possible for life elsewhere in the universe,” Wolfe-Simon said. “And that’s profound.”

Another panelist, Mary Voytek, who at the time was director of NASA’s astrobiology program, a funder of the discovery, said, “It sounds to me like you’re going to need to go out and find a new textbook to teach all those students about what elements are used to build life.”

Wolfe-Simon did not change fundamental biology, but her announcement pointed to a change in how science would be conducted. Researchers trekked down from the ivory tower to have disputes and discussions in the digital open on blogs and in social media. Information flowed under the hashtag #arseniclife, shaking up traditional methods of evaluating truth and rigor in research. The saga highlighted the internet’s possibilities for open discourse and real-time peer review. But it also revealed the perils of the medium, as Wolfe-Simon faced sustained personal attacks. She hasn’t really been part of scientific society since.

During those ensuing years, critics have persistently called for her paper’s retraction. And now, more than a decade later, that retraction is being pursued by the prominent journal that published her team’s work. They continue to defend the work’s integrity.

At the same time, Wolfe-Simon is resurfacing with new experiments that ask fundamental questions about how, exactly, life works — and if the answers are different from what’s in today’s textbooks.

Wolfe-Simon had been thinking for years about life that might substitute arsenic for phosphorus before she went out in search of it. In 2009, among limestone turrets and buzzing flies, she plunged clear plastic tubes into Mono’s mud, gathering samples.

She and her team submitted their paper to Science, the journal that has published such major discoveries as a sequence of the human genome and evidence of ancient water on Mars.

Editors then sent the manuscript out for peer review, in which outside experts evaluate and poke holes in a paper. The analysis that came back was positive, enthusiastic, as science journalist Dan Vergano reported in USA Today after he received the records from NASA under a Freedom of Information Act request. Soon after came NASA’s ET news release and the flashy news conference.

Holden Thorp, the current editor-in-chief of Science, said the journal’s editors weren’t aware of NASA’s framing. “The use of the word ‘extraterrestrial’ was not something we picked up until it had already gotten away from us,” he said. And get away it did.

The hype around the paper soon made Wolfe-Simon, as we say today, the internet’s main character. After the announcement, she delivered a TED Talk, sat for an interview with Glamour magazine and was one of the Time100.

For a couple of days after the news conference, the response was positive. But then blogs run by scientific researchers called attention to methodological concerns with the work and brought doubt to the conclusions.